MOL Containership Detained in Seattle

The U.S. Coast Guard has detained an MOL containership in Seattle over multiple significant violations discovered during port state control inspections.

The violations were discovered Thursday by Port State Control officers from Coast Guard Sector Puget Sound aboard the Panama-flagged MOL Precision. Violations included defective oil bilge line filtering equipment, missing security training records, and not sending required ballast tank information to the National Ballast Information Clearinghouse (NBIC) prior to entering a U.S. port.

According to the Coast Guard, the oil bilge line filtering equipment, required to be maintained so that the ship will not discharge bilge oil overboard, was found to have a non-functional alarm and intermittently operating meter.

As far as the missing security training records, the Coast Guard said that the records of the security drills could not be provided for an eight month period in 2014.

Finally, the required information for any vessel equipped with ballast water tanks and bound for ports or places in the U.S. was not sent to the NBIC, the Coast Guard reported. The NBIC collects, analyzes and interprets ballast water management data to reduce the likelihood of exotic species invasions.

“The Port State Control program holds foreign flagged vessels to internationally agreed upon standards to ensure the safety of life at sea and to prevent damage to the global and local environment,” said Lt. James Tynan, chief of the Sector Puget Sound Port State Control Branch. “We are continuing to monitor the MOL Precision and are working with the crew and Panamanian representatives to correct these deficiencies.”

The crew was conducting cargo operations in Seattle at the time of the exam. Their last port of call was Busan, South Korea.

The vessel will remain in Sector Puget Sound’s Captain of the Port zone until the violations are corrected.